Voice authentication is a biometric type authentication where a speaker's identity is authenticated or verified via a voice signal that is compared to a prerecorded voice print. Voice authentication is usually applied in order to provide access to secure systems, such as bank accounts, credit accounts, databases, web services and systems that contain proprietary and/or secret data, medical records, financial records, personal records, government records and business records, among others.
In general, speaker recognition systems include voice authentication systems and voice identification systems. In voice authentication the identity of a user is authenticated based on a voice signal, whereas in voice identification a user is identified based on a voice signal. Each speaker recognition system has three phases: Enrollment, training and authentication. During enrollment, the speaker's information is registered into a database to identify who the user is and to establish an account. Then the speaker's voice is recorded and typically a number of features are extracted to form one or more recorded voice prints. In the training process, the system is trained to recognize the voice of a speaker. In the authentication phase, a voice signal of a speaker is compared against one or more previously created voice prints of the speaker. For identification systems, a voice signal of a speaker is compared against multiple voice prints of multiple speakers in order to determine the best match while authentication systems compare a speaker's voice signal against one or more stored voice prints of the speaker. Voice based speaker recognition systems have the advantages that they are non-contact systems, non-intrusive, easy to use and can be used for remote authentication.
Currently, most voice authentication systems are used for single platform applications, such as single web-service, single bank account, or single artificial intelligence (AI) device. These voice authentication systems require that the user registers with each individual platform/system and goes through the process of establishing individual voice based authentication accounts and credentials. This is a time consuming process and deters the users from using these voice based authentication systems for accessing individual bank accounts, web services or devices.